The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the rise of illiberal democracy and authoritarianism globally, granting governments unchecked power. In contrast, Asian jurisdictions like Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore have resisted this trend. This chapter investigates the respective constitutional foundations, jurisprudential developments, and democratic processes in Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore that enabled the varying degrees of resistance against the rise of illiberal and authoritarian governance during the pandemic. For example, in Taiwan and South Korea, democratic competition continued unabated during the pandemic, and rights assertions by affected individuals and human rights groups became stronger. In Singapore, albeit usually seen as an authoritarian constitutional polity, the government proactively sought community engagement and social support for undertaking pandemic measures, which were surprisingly less restrictive and more transparent. Moreover, nongovernmental organizations and courts provided counterbalancing forces, ensuring accountability, civic participation, and due process. These experiences show that tensions between the rule of law, human rights, and crises such as COVID-19 can still be mitigated democratically.

Rising to speak in the House of Commons in November 1947, Winston Churchill – by then no longer prime minister but still member of parliament, his party having been defeated in the general election of May 1945 – remarked that “No one pretends that democracy is perfect … Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” Churchill felt especially convinced that it was superior to those varieties of governance that relied upon “a group of super men and super-planners … ‘playing angel’ … and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction.” The following year, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed. While the term democracy is not mentioned, its essence is enshrined in the document, signed by democracies and autocracies alike: “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”

This chapter focuses on a relatively unknown Jewish/German jurist, Dr Walter Schwarz. Schwarz returned to Berlin in the 1950s and practiced as a restitution lawyer. He was one of only a few Jewish lawyers working in Berlin at this time. Schwarz set up a legal journal, where he also published ‘glosses’ under pseudonyms. Found in a library in Berlin, I translate and analyse a selection of these glosses written by Schwarz. Going beyond the legal representation he could offer to his clients, I contend the writing of the glosses is a different method for Schwarz to take responsibility for the conduct of the restitution program. This chapter sets up the way giving an account of restitution can be an ethos – of writing, but also of conduct, of practice.

According to Kant, it is possible to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate laws by means of a certain formal procedure. His criterion for the legitimacy of a draft law is whether or not it corresponds to the ‘General Will’ of a people. The test question Kant has in mind is this: could a people give its consent to a proposed particular law? This chapter discusses the question of how this ‘General Will Test’ (GWT) is related to the Categorical Imperative (CI). As it will turn out, normatively valid laws are justified, in Kant’s view, by the fact that their content is established in a significantly non-ideal way, by a quasi-CI, namely the GWT. Thus, an intermediary position between the two mutually exclusive standard interpretations of Kant’s political philosophy is defended: the ‘derivation reading’ and the ‘separation reading’.

The employer provided everything – wages, housing, post office, parks, canteens. Such a model of the “company town,” where a single corporation dominates in multiple capacities as employer, landlord, service provider, and quasi-regulator over a dwelling area, has endured across borders and time. The term can portray textile mills in eighteenth-century England or coal and steel towns in early twentieth-century America just as fittingly as it does today’s network of “supply chain cities” that span East and Southeast Asia and beyond. This chapter studies Inter-Asia’s supply chain cities – in particular, manufacturing sites in East and Southeast Asia. More than physical spaces, these sites represent a form of legal entrepôt, created by law and capable of shaping laws and norms through diverse pathways, including regulatory fragmentation and coordinated advocacy. In comparison with another gilded-age moment of industrial development – early twentieth-century United States – these modern company towns exemplify the uniqueness of Inter-Asia’s corporate forms, exercise of power, and regional integration.

To carry out its action, the Israeli state must ensure the support of its Western allies and contain criticism from its adversaries or new partners in the Arab world, whose public opinion is highly critical of Israel. To achieve these political objectives, Tel Aviv implemented an unprecedented communication strategy to disseminate its narratives and content to the widest possible audience.

This chapter examines the introduction of new lay participation systems in Asian countries. Focusing on Russia, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, I explore the social and political contexts and goals of the policymakers that motivated the incorporation of citizen decision-making into the legal systems of these countries. In each of the four countries, the adoption of new systems of lay participation occurred during periods of political democratization. Those who argued in favor of citizen involvement hoped that it would promote democratic self-governance, create more robust connections between the citizenry and the government, and improve public confidence in the courts. Policymakers drew on the experiences of other countries, including other Asian nations, to develop a distinctive model that incorporated some features of lay participation systems elsewhere, and modified them to suit the specific circumstances of their own countries.

The existence of democratic systems of government threatens the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes. Democracy presents unique opportunities and vulnerabilities, including public debate and free expression, which nefarious actors can exploit by spreading false information. Disinformation can propagate rapidly across social networks and further authoritarian efforts to weaken democracy. This research discusses how Russia and China leverage online disinformation across contexts and exploit democracies’ vulnerabilities to further their goals. We create an analytical framework to map authoritarian influence efforts against democracies: (i) through longer term, ambient disinformation, (ii) during transitions of political power, and (iii) during social and cultural divides. We apply this framework to case studies involving Western democracies and neighboring states of strategic importance. We argue that both China and Russia aim to undermine faith in democratic processes; however, they bring different histories, priorities, and strategies while also learning from each other and leveraging evolving technologies. A primary difference between the countries’ disinformation against democracies is their approach. Russia builds on its longstanding history of propaganda for a more direct, manipulation-driven approach, and China invested heavily in technological innovation more recently for a permeating censorship-driven approach. Acknowledging it is impossible to know disinformation’s full scope and impact given the current information landscape, the growing international ambition and disinformation efforts leveraged by authoritarian regimes are credible threats to democracy globally. For democracies to stay healthy and competitive, their policies and safeguards must champion the free flow of trustworthy information. Resilience against foreign online disinformation is vital to achieving fewer societal divides and a flourishing information environment for democracies during peaceful – and vulnerable – times.

How do the dual trends of increased misinformation in politics and increased socioeconomic inequality contribute to an erosion of trust and confidence in democratic institutions? In an era of massive misinformation, voters bear the burden of separating truth from lies as they determine how they stand on important issue areas and which candidates to support. When candidates engage in misinformation, it uncouples the already weak link among vote intentions, candidate choice, and policy outputs. At the same time, high levels of economic inequality and social stratification may contribute to lower levels of institutional trust, and the correspondingly more insular socioeconomic groups may experience misinformation differently. Social policy, as a policy area intentionally designed to alleviate risk and redistribute resources, thus becomes a special case where the effects of misinformation and socioeconomic inequality may be crosscutting and heightened.

This chapter explores, in a roundabout way, whether Kant’s legal philosophy relies on his mature ethics of autonomy and respect. The normativity of the law must be externally enforced by coercive measures. The proportionate and credible threat that transgressions will be punished acts as a deterrent and make the rights of individuals comparatively secure – the law is occasionally broken. Now, the Kantian state does not concern itself with why in particular citizens break or comply with the law. In that sense, Kant’s philosophy of law does not rely on his ethical theory or moral psychology. But agents must be in a position to comply with the law. They must face a meaningful choice, which can only be secured by the availability of the motive of ethics: respect for the law. Without respect, agents would be exposed to prudential considerations only. Those who break the law take their criminal act to be prudentially justified. Viewed from this limited perspective, their actions turn out to be imprudent if they are punished for them. But punishability and imprudence are different. So, making what the law prohibits properly illegal requires an ethical foundation after all.

This chapter contends that writing is a practice of taking responsibility for restitution. I focus on works by W. G. Sebald, Alexander Kluge and Heimrad Bäcker. In his last speech before his death, Sebald stated ‘only in literature […] can there be a form of restitution’. I look at the way two of his novels, The Emigrants (1992) and Austerlitz (2001), are literally put together and examine how they correspond to this restitutive obligation. In addition, I examine short stories by Alexander Kluge from 1962 and 2013 and the form of their response to the NS regime. I also show how the concrete poetry of Heimrad Bäcker in his work transcript (1986) demonstrates a writing practice of fragmentation and citation in its confrontation with the NS legal archives. The works in this chapter span three different literary genres and all show a struggle with the persona of the author and the practice of writing – its possibilities and its responsibilities – in the aftermath of the NS regime and the Holocaust.

The introduction briefly reviews the growing significance of remote work and then presents the volume’s holistic and interactive approach to studying the impact and regulation of this employment approach. With a rooting in methodological discussions and institutional analysis, this approach assumes that the full impact of remote work can only be understood by identifying and analyzing ways in which different employment forms and their regulation interact with one another in complex ways. Thus, for example, an employee’s work is not only remote or located in the traditional workplace but it is also part time or full time and so forth. Moreover, each of these conditions may be only partial in nature. Not only in empirical reality but also in the regulation of work, types of employment and their regulation interact with one another in ways that the volume identifies, explains and theorizes, opening up new understandings. The introduction then lays out the thematic concerns and main arguments of the chapters authored by a distinguished set of contributors.

This chapter defines the different terms “miscarriage of justice,” “wrongful convictions” and “proven innocence.” Although these terms are often used interchangeably with differences ascribed to customs and semantics, there are critical differences between them. Miscarriages of justice is the broadest term. In some definitions, it can include any violation of rights. In the criminal context, miscarriages of justice can include unfair trials and unwarranted pre-trial detentions. A wrongful conviction is a narrower term that requires a conviction that is subsequently overturned. As measured in recently developed registries, wrongful convictions are convictions overturned on the basis of new evidence relevant to guilt or innocence. Finally, the narrowest term is proven innocence. This approach is most popular in the United States, where it is also called factual or actual innocence. It was pioneered by Edwin Borchard and used by innocence projects. Formalistic arguments that proven innocence does not violate the presumption of innocence are critiqued. Consistent with Guido Calabresi’s and Phillip Bobbitt’s tragic choice theory, the use of the different terms differs over time and place, and they are used to ration justice.